Mr. Gregory Ozegbe is chairman/CEO, Africa Alliance Group, an investment banking group that provides local and on-the-ground investment banking services across the African continent. Since it launched operations in 1992, the company has invested heavily in building structures and professional teams throughout the continent to meet the investment banking needs of clients. These include national governments, municipalities, parastatals, pension funds and large to medium-sized public and private companies.
For three decades, the Group has remained devoted to building a substantial pan-African investment banking platform. The mission is informed by an understanding of the need to build African markets from small or non-existent platforms to achieve a base that will enable the continent take its place among mainstream developing markets and capitalise on its abundant resources. This involves grass-roots focus of providing Africa’s vast untapped low end of the financial markets with financial products.
Ozegbe has been in charge of overseeing the group’s developmental operations since May 2000. He has led it to build unit trusts where there are none, create bond markets and yield curves to price capital, research equities and bonds, manage pension funds and raise private equity for opportunities. Trading funds are created to eliminate price inefficiencies and its advisory business partners with local and international capital to create economic value.
After starting in Eswatini, the company’s development model has been extended to most parts of Africa. The company expresses its commitment to building and developing local talent – which it ranks a core value and the most essential ingredient of its success. It is presently on a new phase of establishing and adapting the model to the rest of the continent over the next two decades.
Africa Alliance Group’s model is one of long-term commitment to build people and markets, which differentiates it from short-term orientation of the present age. “We understand that pioneering work is lengthy and difficult. Importantly, our shareholders fully support our long-term, multi-generational vision, the company stated in its corporate profile.
The company’s operations cover the broad areas of asset management, corporate finance, stockbroking, private equity and third-party administration.
Its asset management activities are designed to provide unique investment solutions to private and institutional investors operating locally and internationally. The business has expanded from its starting point in Eswatini to Botswana to Kenya and Lesotho as well as offering pan-African products out of the company’s South African office. Its clients include governments, parastatals, pension and endowment funds, corporate institutions and non-government organisations with assets under management of $1.1 billion at the beginning of 2020.
The company serves institutional investors across Africa through its investment vehicles, which include Segregated portfolios, Unitized portfolios, Listed funds and Structured products. It has a consistent long term track record of value creation to show for its investment management services.
It links its impressive track record to the breadth of its business and the Group’s physical presence across the African continent, which enables superior understanding of local African markets that are charaterised by informational inefficiencies. It figures out unique investment opportunities with its expansive physical African network of offices and professionals.
Its investment decisions are then guided by its robust research resources and a long-term value-based investment philosophy. Its portfolio construction is tailored to clients’ balanced, equity, fixed income or cash mandates.
In order to meet the needs of private investors, African Alliance Asset Management has pioneered unit trust markets across its physical African presence. It is the first asset managers to launch unit trusts in Eswatini, Botswana and Kenya as well as entering the Lesotho market. This is in its commitment to foster a culture of savings and drive the development of capital markets in Africa. It assures that collective investment schemes are the most appropriate investment vehicles to achieve these objectives.
African Alliance’s range of unit trusts offer investors cost effective access to highly qualified and experienced investment professionals, competitive returns, liquidity and easy access to money, diversified investment exposure, convenient and flexible investing and investor protection.
Ozegbe is steering the wheel of African Alliance’s investment drive for Africa in its recognition of the continent as the great emerging market and the last investment heaven of the world. The company has launched pan-African products to provide investors with direct access to emerging African opportunities. Served by an experienced team on ground, the investment products offer a unique opportunity to capitalise on the growth of the emerging African consumer in a structured and risk focused manner.
The big investment opportunity around which the Group has designed its pan-African products springs from the continent’s credentials – the second largest in the world, covering 20 percent of landmass, home to approximately 15 percent of the world’s population and a GDP higher than that of India and ranks with Russia and Brazil.
It projects Africa as a compelling emerging investment story with a sustainable growth trajectory that reflects its rapid population growth and increasing rate of urbanisation. The continent is projected to be home to one-fifth of mankind by 2050, offering the biggest labour force to the world with increased productivity pointing to improved economic fundamentals.
Investment banking services of the Group are carried out across the African continent by its subsidiary, African Alliance Capital. Its services cover capital raising, corporate finance, advisory services, privatisation, debt issuance and debt restructuring. Its clients include national governments, municipalities, parastatals, pension funds and large to medium-sized public and private companies.
Its structure of engagement is long term in line with its commitment to sustained development of African economies. Its objective is to assist in deepening and advancing capital markets and, where necessary, challenge the legislative environment to promote greater investor opportunities and protection.
